Re: Dvorak (& Lojban)

[JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

cu'u la kris
 > Or I suppose you could even use
>different te clani when making pseudo-mathematical comparison between
>abstractions: "he's twice as stupid as the world is round".  The thing
being
>compared here (some assumed equivalence relation between IQ and variability
>of curvature) is even more absurd than using inverse meters as a measure of
>shortness, but both can be imagined.

But I have no problem in using {ka/ni clani} like that! As long as it is
clear
that you are being pseudo-mathematical. To say that something is twice
as clani as something else, you need that both things be clani, and you
don't need that one have twice the length of the other.

> "ni clani fi le mitre" ought to be about the
>same as "mitre",

Here we disagree. For example, a 1 cm object is mitre be li pinopa,
but it is not clani fi le mitre (it is not long with respect to a 1m thing).
Why would you say that something that is not long with respect to
a 1m thing has some amount of being long with respect to the 1m thing.

                        le centre cu mitre li pinopa
                        i le centre na clani fi le mitre
                        i xu le ni le centre cu clani fi le mitre cu cmalu

> and "ka ke'a zu'i zmadu le mitre" should be similar to
>"clani"

 I don't think le mitre can be a te zmadu. I would say that
{ko'a clani fi ko'e} requires that {ko'a ko'e zmadu le ka mitre}.

 >I agree then when speaking of objective lengths it would be
>more straightforward to use mitre than some construction involving clani.

I think that if you use clani you are introducing an additional
concept. In English you can say: "These two are very short.
They're not long at all, but one is twice as long as the other."
Obviously the second "long" doesn't have the same meaning
as the first one. The first one is clani, the second one should
be expressed with mitre.

The same happens with "longer". Can you say that one
thing is longer than another when you wouldn't say that
either of them is long? In English, yes. In Lojban, you
shouldn't use {clani} to translate "longer". We should
rather use tremau: zmadu fi le ka mitre.

co'o mi'e xorxes